The Cult of Irrationalism

The word cult is often thrown around to describe things somebody doesn’t like, things like Islam, Scientology, or the brand loyalty of Apple users. It’s usually wielded pejoratively toward something that stands in opposition to a larger orthodoxy like mainstream Christianity or Chrome usage, but a better definition of a cult is a group that neither tolerates dissent nor criticism of the group’s leaders or doctrines — at least that’s how it was used when I was in school. In that sense Islam is not a cult, though some subgroups certainly are; and I doubt even the most extreme Apple-heads qualify. Scientology does sound like a cult based on what I’ve read although I think it’s more of a criminal syndicate than anything else, but that’s a post for a different time.

Just up the street from me in New Haven, Erika Christakis has found herself tied to the altar beneath the cultists’ sacrificial knives. In response to the hysteria incited by a benign email she wrote about Halloween costumes, Christakis, a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center with nearly a dozen alphabet blocks of advanced degrees after her name, announced that she would stop teaching and focus on her research, far from the teeth and claws of the Dionysian mob. She and her husband will remain as masters at one of the undergrad residences, though likewise her husband will take a sabbatical next semester to work on his research.

It’s difficult to imagine how such a kitchen match as Christakis’s email, which you can read in its entirety here, could create so much smoke. With typical academic navel-gazing but harmless language, Christakis merely suggested that cultural norms of what constitute appropriate Halloween costumes should derive from within the student body and not from top-down authority. That Summer-of-Love sentiment was apparently too John Galt for the mob who confronted her husband on campus. If, like me, you’re confused about what precise opinion or phrase it is that the students objected to, you won’t find it no matter how hard you look because this isn’t about rationalism. Rather the Yale protesters, like their fellow travelers at too many other colleges, have embraced an anti-Enlightenment emotionalism, a kind of dark angry Romanticism, where feelings and demands for “safe spaces” supposedly transcend logic, and where the marketplace of ideas, whether spoken, emailed, or worn on October 31st, is somehow a jack boot stomping on them. Don’t bother to question it either, because to question it is just freedom of speech, which in the words of one recent Brown University grad, “should be valued but not when it infringes upon the freedom of others.”

I cannot blame Christakis for retreating into her work. It’s difficult to imagine who is the worse for it: Christakis, who after years of studying and working and paying student loans has now had an income avenue closed to her by the horde (apparently she was paid for each course she taught); or those students who were not among the protesters, who have now lost access to Christakis’s knowledge and experience. What’s really eye-opening here is how quickly statements of inclusion for women and minorities go out the window as soon as one of them strays from the cult’s dogma; and how loudly the cult claims to speak for women and minorities but how cynical they are in silencing a woman when she fails to chant in unison. Erika Christakis is too good for Yale.